


War in Pieces

by crossingwinter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: But not the canon era we've seen yet, Canon Era, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-14 22:43:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8031808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “Would it have been kinder?  To let you die?”  She could hear Sandor’s humorless laugh in the back of her head, humorless and bitter the way life truly seemed to be.  You like him?  Prissy little lordling that he is?  I suppose he’s pretty.  And I’m a man of the gods now, so you can’t have me.  He’d laughed again.  She’d known he’d not given two figs about Ned, but he’d known that Sansa would care, he’d known and he’d– she closed her eyes.  She could still smell the scent of his burning flesh, could still smell her father’s blood on the steps, could see his face tarred on the castle walls.





	War in Pieces

“He’s awake, my lady,” whispered Gawen, and Sansa rose to her feet.  She’d been sitting for so long that her back had grown warm, accustomed to her seat.  She flinched as she pulled the cloak more tightly about her.   _ Damn him _ , she thought bitterly.  Ramsay Bolton’s destruction of this part of Winterfell had ruined the pipes that carried the warm water through the walls, and it made the castle that much more frightfully cold. 

The wounded were kept in the warm.  The hale suffered the drafts.

Sansa tugged her furs more tightly around her, and tried to prepare herself for the cold outdoors.  But there was no preparation for the sharp winds that pierced her furs and drove its way into her heart, there was no preparation for the way tears froze on her face, even as she bowed her head against the wind, there was no preparation for any of it at all.  

Vague memories of her very early youth filled her mind as she forced herself through wind and snow.  She’d been small, and Arya had been only a baby, and she’d been so cold that she’d never wanted to leave the her mother’s bedchamber, much less the castle.   _ It was always so warm in there,  _ she thought.   _ Much warmer than the rest of Winterfell.   _

It was a relief when she entered the keep again, warmth covering her–true warmth.  Not as warm as springtime, or summer, but enough to make her feel the tip of her nose again, and to let her cloak hang a little more loosely over her body as she went up the stairs.  Men lined the halls.  Some were groaning, some were sleeping.  Sansa resisted the urge to bend down and examine their wounds.  For some of them, she had helped stitch their skin back together, her hand oddly calm as it held the needle, a motion so familiar and yet so different; for others she’d sung to calm them as the woodswitches and maesters alike had cut away rotting and frozen flesh.  

She passed Maester Pylos as he was coming out of the bedchamber she and Arya had shared as girls.  “He’s awake?” she asked, and Pylos nodded.  “Is he lucid?”

“As much as can be expected, given the bloodloss,” Pylos said.  Sansa nodded, and continued down the hallway until she reached a set of heavy wooden doors that led to her father’s bedchamber.  When she’d been a girl, they’d been much larger, and while he’d been away fighting the ironborn, she’d been frightened of them.  But now she opened the door without pause.

The room was dark.  No candles were lit, and there was only the guttering of a fire in the hearth.  “You’re not too cold?” she asked him.  She couldn’t see him clearly at all.

“No,” he rasped, and it sent a chill down her spine.  “But another log on the fire wouldn’t hurt.”

She took a piece of wood from the basket by the hearth and placed it on the flame, listening to it hiss and crackle.  She stood a little straighter and took several candles from the mantle and lit them, placing two of them on the mantle and bringing one to the bedside, and placing it in a candlestick.

The left side of his face was covered in bandages, and his eyes were heavily lidded and feverish.

“Maester Pylos says I have been asleep for four days,” he said.  His voice was very dry.  Sansa looked around the room and spotted a pitcher on the other bedstand.  She rounded the bed and poured him a mug full of ice-melt.

“Nearly five,” she said.  “You weren’t conscious when they brought you in.”  She rounded the bed again, and sat down, holding the mug to his lips.  He drank.

"And Sandor?" he asked.

Sansa closed her eyes.  How pale he’d been.  He’d seemed less huge in death.  More a little boy than ever she’d seen him.  How he had hated the idea that they would burn his body if he died, but they’d had no choice in the matter.  The wights were fearsome enough as it was, but give them Sandor’s strength...  He’d understood that much, at least.

“He died,” she said.  Her voice sounded empty to her ears.  She’d wept when he’d burned. Even now, she could smell the scent of his burning flesh.   _ Did it smell that way when he was a boy?  Could he smell that his burning flesh, as good as any savory dinner meat?   _ She looked down at her hands.

“Oh,” Ned said.  He sounded stricken.  “Oh.”  Sansa did not look at him.  She could not.  He’d been no friend of Sandor’s–not truly.  They’d barely trusted one another, but Sandor had brought him back all the same...  “And Arya?”

Sansa looked up, her eyes drifting to the window.   _ And Arya.   _ Of course he would think of Arya first.  She was his friend, after all. __ It still pained her that everyone thought of Arya first.  Her little sister who rode with wolves and commanded the darkness.  She wondered if they thought less of her for not being Arya, then took a deep breath.   _ They thought less of Arya for not being me, once _ , she reminded herself.  She hated that she needed to remind herself.  It only proved Arya’s point.  

“She rides,” Sansa said simply.  It was the easiest thing to say.  “I’ve heard nothing to say she’s not still alive.”  Rickon would know, just as Rickon knew that Bran was still alive, just as he knew that Jon still fought.  Her siblings all had eyes and ears with one another, and she was alone.   _ If Lady were still alive... _ She tried to imagine her sweet Lady as the great shaggy hulking beast that Shaggydog and Nymeria had become.  She’d woven ribbons through Lady’s fur.   _ She’s not a dog, she’s a direwolf _ , Sansa remembered telling Septa Mordane once.   _ And now the Hound is dead for true, just like Lady.   _

_ Sandor is dead, and Ned lives, but Ned cares for Arya more than me.  Everyone cares for Arya more than me.   _

Bitterness washed over her again.  She tried not to be bitter.  Better that Arya was alive and fighting, better that Sansa wasn’t alone.  But Sansa did not like feeling useless, did not like feeling brushed aside.  And so long as there were the dead outside the walls of the castle, so long as Jon rode dragons, and Arya ranged at the head of a pack of a thousand wolves, no one cared if Sansa was in Winterfell. No one cared if she was helping ensure that the southron lords who’d ridden north bore no ill-will towards Jon’s leadership, if her hands just as dirty as the rest of them.

_ Clean hands, Sansa.   _

Sansa closed her eyes.  She’d blocked away that voice, had told herself not to think of him, of his body burned, of his head tarred and stuck on the walls of the castle that had been her father’s.  But it didn’t work, and all it took was one errant thought, and it was as though there was a veil pressed over her face, obstructing her breath again.  She wished she could wash her hands, scrub away at her skin until it came loose from her bones and maybe then she’d be truly rid of him.

She got to her feet and went to the door again.  “Where are you going?”  Ned asked.  He sounded dismayed.  Sansa left the door open and found a basin along the hallway near a sleeping soldier.  She picked it up, then went to one of the cabinets that they kept stocked at the end of the hallway and found a rag, and poured some clean water into the basin.  She returned to her father’s bedchamber, closing the door behind her and sat down on the bed next to Ned.  

“I’d thought to clean away some of the sweat,” she said.  “You’re feverish.”  

“Oh.”

She let the water cover her hands for just a moment before she wrung the towel clean and peeled the furs back from Ned’s chest.  There were bandages on his chest as well–ones that looked clean enough.  They’d needed changing frequently when first he’d been brought back, but now the intervals were longer.  Sansa dabbed at his chest and neck with the rag, and he closed his eyes.

“What has happened since I...Since I returned?” He sounded tentative, and Sansa refreshed the rag.

“They fight,” she said brusquely.  “And some of them live, and some of them die.”  That was the way of war.  Not at all like the songs, more blood and guts, and those who fell rising to fight again, their eyes dead and blue.  

“Have we done anything?  Have we–” he paused, weighing his words, and Sansa cut him off.

“It is unchanged in large part.  There are flanks to the east and the west, and Daenerys and her dragon fly in the North with my husband–” How glad she was to still be wed to him, or else she’d have been wedded and bedded with Horrible Harrold, who was harder to manage than all of the northern lords who called her Lady Lannister, and the southron ones who didn’t care that once she’d loved queen Margaery as dearly as a sister.  How glad she was, even if it did mean that the smiles she thought she saw Ned give her were guilty ones, one more thing she wanted but could not have “–and the one he charmed.  The third has yet to be seen.”

“We need the third,” Ned grimaced.

“Well, we may not have it,” Sansa said calmly, and he gave her a sharp look.  

“Don’t say that,” he said.  “Please.  All is lost if we don’t have the third dragon.”

Sansa settled the rag in the bowl of water and looked at Ned.  “I am a woman, and know little of war,” she said, pleased with how little bitterness there was in her voice.   _ Jon listens to Arya, and Daenerys, and Asha, and Brienne, but not to me.  I know nothing of the battlefield, so I can’t know anything at all.   _ But it was dangerous to say it, dangerous for if his men thought him weak, what fragmentation would happen then?  And she was trying so hard not to let them be fragmented, to undo what damage he’d done before his head had ended up on the walls of Winterfell.   _ Even if he knew you were clever, and listened... _ “But my understanding is when a plan of attack cannot continue because something has not gone to plan, you change it.”  In that, war was not so different from the game.

_ It’s not a game,  _ she thought vehemently.   _ My father’s head wasn’t a piece.   _

But the way that Jon had moved pieces across the map, assigning the lords of the South their commands, each marked by a little carved piece of stone.  He stared at them so solemnly, looking so much like father.   _ He’s not father’s son, but they name him king. _

_ You should be queen.   _ She remembered him saying.  He’d brushed a hand through her hair, and smiled at her.   _ With my wits and Cat’s beauty... _

When she’d been a girl, it was all she wanted, and now...  _ It shouldn’t be Jon.  He’s not of father’s line.  He’s not a Stark, not truly.   _ But that could wait for when they were at peace.  If they were ever at peace.  If they lived so long.

“There’s no time,” Ned whispered, his face falling.  “There’s no time at all.”

“There will need to be time, or else we are all lost,” Sansa said firmly.  He was growing agitated, she could see that much, and she did not like the sickly color of his flush.  “Don’t concern yourself with it now.”

“How can I not?” he demanded.

“You must rest, Ned.  You must heal.”   _ You’ll be of no use to anyone if you prolong your own weakness,  _ she wanted to say, but that felt hard, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be hard–not right now, not around Ned.  She got enough of that around the lords every day without needing it around Ned.  Part of what she liked about Ned was that she didn’t need to be hard in his presence.  She hadn’t felt that in years.

Her words did not seem to help.  On the contrary, his eyes went dull, and his head tilted against the headboard, and when he spoke it was a grumble quite unlike the way he usually spoke.  “What does it matter if I heal?  I’ll only die in a few days then.  Clegane needn’t have died bringing me in–it would have been kinder to leave me to die.” Sansa stiffened, and her fingers tightened into a half fist as she stared at him. “That was–forgive me.  I don’t know what came over me.”

“Would it have been kinder?  To let you die?”  She could hear Sandor’s humorless laugh in the back of her head, humorless and bitter the way life truly seemed to be.   _ You like him?  Prissy little lordling that he is?  I suppose he’s pretty.  And I’m a man of the gods now, so you can’t have me.   _ He’d laughed again.  She’d known he’d not given two figs about Ned, but he’d known that Sansa would care, he’d known and he’d _ – _ she closed her eyes.  She could still smell the scent of his burning flesh, could still smell her father’s blood on the steps, could see his face tarred on the castle walls.  

“I didn’t mean that.,” Ned said quickly, suddenly nervous.  He leaned forward again, wincing, and Sansa’s eyes dropped to his side with its clean white bandage.  Had he opened the wound again?  Would it need changing again soon?  “Not kinder, but not cruel either.”  He didn’t sound as though he meant it.  “Something else.”

“It was kindness to save you.”   _There is no such thing as true kindness, Alayne._  Sansa could hear the crackling of the fire as though it was right beside her, but Ned seemed suddenly so far away.  There’d been a fire in the room when he’d brushed her darkened hair behind her ear and said, _You must understand, sweetling, it would be a better world if kindness were more than a song.  You are young, and sweet to still believe it._ “Kindness to me,” she said.  There had been a fire when he’d kissed her–when she’d thought he’d kissed her, green fire, and the smell of smoke in the distance.  She could feel his lips, truly feel them, and yet he had said she must have dreamed it because he hadn’t, not truly, not until he’d died and she’d pressed her lips to his.  It had been different then.  Cold and lifeless and real.  

“My lady?”  

“He took no pleasure in it, I’m sure.”  

“Dying?”

“Saving you.  But he did it for me.”

“I don’t understand.” But his eyes seemed to.  “Do you…”

Sansa cut him off, surprised at how cold her voice sounded.  “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.”

“Sansa, your hus–”

But Tyrion didn’t matter, Tyrion was far from her mind right now, riding on dragonback as he was somewhere at war.  “It would have been kinder if you’d died.”  

He shifted in his seat, finding one of her hands with his.  “Did those words wound you so much?”  His voice was quiet, and his eyes apologetic, and Sansa realized she was breathing very hard.  “I was not thinking, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know that I believe you.”

“Oh?”

“My lady, I…” his voice tapered away.   _ If he were Petyr, he’d not have said a thing, if he were Sandor he’d have said it all.   _ But he was neither.  He was Ned, whose very name made her feel somehow safe–as safe as she could feel in this Winterfell, the burned shell of her childhood home, surrounded by death and despair, hardly the summer castle she remembered.  

_ Does he think to spare my feelings? _

“You what?”  

“There is more to your mind than you are saying now,” he said slowly, through teeth that weren’t quite gritted but which seemed to be biting the words back into his mouth all the same.  “I can see it in your eyes, and I’d have you tell me.”  He had not looked away from her.  He had not, and Sansa felt suddenly uncomfortable.  If he were Sandor, he’d have threatened, if he were Petyr he’d have lured, but he wasn’t either of them.  He was Ned, and that made her all the more frightened.

“I am telling you.  I shall forgive you for saying–”

“I think you’re lying to me. Saying what you think I wish to hear. ”  His words cut like a knife.  _ Sansa’s just a liar,  _ Arya had said right to her face, and Sansa had wanted to shriek at her sister, to scream that if she’d only understood she’d have lied too, but Arya had never understood any of it, not truly.  But she hadn’t shrieked, she hadn’t said anything at all, so surely Ned would have no way of knowing how it hurt. “I’ve stared in the face of death, Sansa, but I fear what you’re hiding behind your eyes far more.”

“What do you think I’m hiding?”

“I don’t know.  I could not say.”

“But you think that I am?”  

“The more you prevaricate, the more convinced of it I am.”  It wasn’t a lie–not truly.  Not telling the whole truth wasn’t a lie, was it?  Except it could be.  Father hadn’t told the truth about Jon.  

Sansa took a deep breath.  “What does it mean to be kind, Lord Edric?”

“What does it mean–”

“To be kind, yes.  What does it mean?  What makes one kind?”   _ It can’t be kindness if someone feels indebted to you for the kindness.  That is not truly altruistic, and there is no action in the world where you won’t feel good about yourself for doing something.  Better to accept it and use it to your advantage.  It’s amazing what pieces will do for players who are kind to them.    _ His breath had been sweet and minty, and how desperately she’d wanted not to believe him.  Except he’d told her that he would never lie to her.  He never would, but he had.  Had that been a kindness?  Had that been his kindness?  Sparing her pain, killing her father?

“Kindness is showing compassion when cruelty is an option.”

Sansa stopped breathing and stared at him, weighing his words carefully.  “Showing compassion?”

He almost laughed, as if to say  _ surely you know what I mean.   _ “My lady?”

“Because I can show compassion.  I can curtsey, and smile, and throw alms to the poor, and sew the skins of wounded soldiers back together.  That is showing compassion when cruelty is an option.”

“Do you not feel kind, then?”  A gentle smile played at Ned’s lips, a sincere one. 

“I–” but she cut herself off.  She’d always been a good girl, a good lady, after all.  Whatever it was she was supposed to do, she’d done it, like some little bird from the Summer Islands, Alayne the ever-dutiful daughter.  How good she was at showing–showing that she supported Jon’s command when all she could think was that he was  _ not _ Eddard Stark’s son and did not deserve her father’s seat in Winterfell, it wasn’t  _ right _ .  Yes, she could  _ show _ just about anything she wanted.  

“You feel the show more than the action.” Sansa looked at him.  His words weren’t a condemnation, but she felt them all the same.  Something in them wasn’t right, but Sansa didn’t know what. “Do you not think you are compassionate when you do those things?” Ned asked.

“I feel sad for them, I pity, I want to make it better, but is it kind?”

“Why wouldn’t it be kind?  Do you find them vile when you do it?”

“No.  I’m not Queen Cersei.  I want them to love me.”  She always had, even when frightened for her life.  She remembered her father, and that love was a surer way to people’s loyalty than fear.   _ But that is not altruistic either.  _   She wanted to cry.

“So, then I don’t see–”

“Is it truly kind?  If I want them to love me and that’s why I do it?  Is it not for me more than for them, is it not selfish?”

“Why do you fear it so?  That you are not kind, I mean.”

_ Because what if what they think of me is true?  What if I’m as unthinking as Arya says, as detached as the Lady Lannister they call me, as manipulative of any bastard of Petyr Baelish.   _ She’d only ever wanted to be a good lady, like one of the ladies in the songs, but the songs were lies, and Sansa, gods be good–Sansa had lied so much that she didn’t know where the lies ended and the truth began.  

“I…” Sansa swallowed, looking at Ned.  His eyes were dark in this light, dark the way Sandor’s eyes were dark, even if Sandor’s eyes had been grey and Ned’s were blue.   _ He even has a scar on his face now too... _ “I want there to be some good left in the world.  I want to be good.  I’ve always been a good lady, but...but what did it mean to be good?  Somehow it always felt different than what it should have been.”

“That’s the way of things, though,” Ned said gently.  He reached to take her hand and Sansa did her best to ignore the flutter in her stomach as he did so.  “I always thought war would be more glorious than it is.  But it’s shit and blood and death, and men who hate you dragging you to safety because he knows the woman he loves wants me and not him.”  Sansa took a deep breath, but Ned continued solemnly, “A loyal dog to the end.  It was his heroism, not my own, that saved my life.  That’s not how the songs made me think my life would be.  But I push on–I have to, even if it wouldn’t have been cruel to let me die.  Elsewise I’d be the same boy who sobbed over my lord’s death.”  

She remembered screaming when the sword had swung on Baelor’s steps, and being so convinced that she would save him.  How stupid she’d been.   _ It wasn’t that you were mean, Sansa, it was that you were unaware of it,  _ Arya had said her eyes and voice hard as steel.  She’d wanted to look away, to hide from it, or to listen but not let herself see as she’d looked at her father’s head but not seen it.  Except what good would come of that?  It hurt, but she understood better now at least… She forced herself to breathe.  She felt a chill creeping across her again, a slight buzz on her skin.  

_ Understand, be aware.  See all the pieces, Alayne.   _ But the pieces weren’t on a board, they were all in her mind.  What her father wanted her to be, and her mother, and Septa Mordane, and Joffrey, and Sandor, and Littlefinger, and Jon, and Arya, and Ned.  They all thought they knew the game, but they didn’t, they couldn’t.  But did Sansa know the game?  It was her game, after all.  She could change the rules.  

_ I want to be kind,  _ she thought.  Arya said she hadn’t been when they’d been girls, while Septa Mordane had said she was learning to be the kindest, sweetest lady the kingdoms had ever seen.  Cersei thought she was stupid for it.  Littlefinger said that kindness didn’t exist, but she must learn to be what others thought was kind.  And she had.   _ I learned that. _  She wondered if Petyr had only ever thought of himself as a master.  She wondered if he’d stopped learning because he wanted to, or because he thought he was done.  But Sansa...

“I suppose I could learn.  Learn to be kind.”

Ned made a huff of impatience.  “Sansa, you are kind.  Don’t you see?  You are so concerned with your own good heart that you couldn’t possibly not be kind.”

“But I’m bitter.  I’m angry.”  _ I hurt my sister, and want Jon off his throne when the fighting is done.  They told me I was kind when I was a girl, and I was sometimes, but I was also cruel, and now…  _ It made her head spin.  “Those aren’t kindnesses.”

“And why must kindness be the only thing?  Can’t you be kind, and bitter, and hopeful, and angry?  I know I am.”  Sansa stared at him.  The ladies in the songs were never bitter, or angry–not unless they were evil like Queen Cersei.   _ I’m not a lady in a song–I’m more than that.  My life is more than a song.   _ “And so what if you’re not kind now?  You want to be.  So you will be.”   _ There is no such thing as true kindness,  _ the fire whispered in her ears.  “Besides, I’d be more worried if you wanted to give it up for good.”

Sansa sat up straighter.  She felt warm again, and when she looked at him, his face was so serious, so earnest, and for a moment, he almost reminded her of her father.   _ Ned, lying in Ned Stark’s bed,  _ she thought.

And she wasn’t sure what made her do it.  She was married, after all, and not to him. Except she was feeling warm again, and the walls of the castle were warm the way she’d remembered them being as a girl, and so she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.  He let out a startled sound in the back of his throat before raising a hand to cup the back of her head.  His hand was trembling.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, “That was unladylike.”   _ But it was me,  _ she thought, and it was as though she were lying in the summer sun.  It was what she’d wanted, and she’d done it, and she felt almost wicked for it.

Ned’s hand was still on the back of her head, and his lips met hers again, and in that moment, Sansa sensed he saw her almost as she wanted to be seen.


End file.
